John Marston
Senior Member
Americans' understanding of who counts as "white" has changed dramatically throughout the country's history and even over the last century alone. This map — which covers a decade of immigration to the US, from 1892 to 1903 (via the JF Ptak Science Books blog and Slate) — is a dramatic illustration of what it looked like when "white" wasn't the same thing as European.
The Map
Here's how to read the map: each state (plus DC and Puerto Rico) gets an infographic describing its immigrant population. The right column of the infographic covers how many immigrants settled in the state each year, and how many of the country's immigrants that represented. The left column covers the occupations those settlers held. And the top bar depicts the ethnic mix of each state's new immigrant population, color-coded by race — with notes about the nationalities with the biggest populations
The immigrants represented on this map could apply for citizenship five years after arriving in the US, without having to go through intermediate steps like a green card, as most immigrants have to today. And they didn't even have to learn English to become US citizens.
The Map
Here's how to read the map: each state (plus DC and Puerto Rico) gets an infographic describing its immigrant population. The right column of the infographic covers how many immigrants settled in the state each year, and how many of the country's immigrants that represented. The left column covers the occupations those settlers held. And the top bar depicts the ethnic mix of each state's new immigrant population, color-coded by race — with notes about the nationalities with the biggest populations
The immigrants represented on this map could apply for citizenship five years after arriving in the US, without having to go through intermediate steps like a green card, as most immigrants have to today. And they didn't even have to learn English to become US citizens.